Earlier in the year we piloted out OVH for a little bit, to see if the performance metrics matched up against the current gear from LSN. The network was far superior in terms of PoP's in Europe compared to LSN. LimeStone Networks believe it or not experiences complete network outages daily, causing their Data-Center to drop off the face of the earth. Unfortunately though, the issue is since they're much smaller LSN can offer new gear much more easily. The Haswell upgrade caused us not to move as the @Luffaren Lag-o-vator would have returned, the best OVH had was Ivy Bridge. So there we sat, on Limestone Networks.

Towards the end of the summer, we had banned a kid who seemed to have a little bit of money. They bought 'booter' services or whatever they're being called now, and essentially caused the week long outage on individual servers. The attack seemed mostly targeted against Zombie Escape. However the attack varied between ZE, ZombieMod, MiniGames, Mumble, and ZombieLila.

We argued a bit back and forth, but we had the foresight to see it coming... At the time I was moving from place to place every couple days, didn't have the typical HSIA and I think I was on another persons WiFi. Brian bought the new server for a week, then we waited the night for OVH to set it up. I believe in the morning I sprinted a little and got the basics running, then...

So you may have been wondering what the esoteric titles were about... I was whining to @Brian Friday night about how consistently bad our FastDL (hereon referred to as SlowDL) server is. There are times when it just really chugs *insert crude word here*. We previously talked about getting an SSD but couldn't justify the downtime, reorganization, and system update (Debian doesn't really support modern hardware; ssds included). So I frustratingly looked at the LSN server page yet again, and saw they had increased the base bandwidth packages from 6TB to 10TB. I also noticed they discounted a ton of base packages, RAM, and their gbit ports. I priced out our same web-server with much improved specs, it came out about $10 more expensive for a Haswell CPU (same price if we had gotten Ivy Bridge), with memory, and disks tripled (bandwidth doubled). Well, shit; it's the same price and this was the super discounted server. I priced out new game-servers, with improved disk capacity, because you know, Mappers ( ), this was an actual win in price. So we can upgrade our hardware, and save money. We went to bed, baffled, planning to wake up in the morning. We also made a ticket to request to have our networks transferred, which is almost always the nightmare. Presumably the $20 charge per network now (it was previously free; don't get me started on horrible tactics...) is to help prevent the confusion because there's a transaction. But I digress, onwards!

Brian rolled out of bed at about 11AM my time (10AM his; we finished at around 3AM). I...

For over two years now, I've been working on and off on a plugin set I'm calling ZombieMod: Extended. The goal of the set is to be a complete run time modular replacement of Zombie:Reloaded by Greyscale (and Richard later on), which was an Open-Source replacement for ZombieMod by C0ld, which was forked from the open-source release of NemoD by Fysh in 2005. I've had to take many breaks from working on the plugin set due to really old (non-valve) bugs in SourceMod's Logic; some of them were quite challenging to fix and took months (one in fact took over a year) of time/investigating. This allowed ZME development to continue onwards, whereas before using core parts of the SM API would result in memory corruption. There were at least 9 bugs that blocked the development of ZME, and I'm happy to say they're fixed (for everyone using SourceMod). SourceMod at the moment still has a few lingering crash bugs, but it's at the point where ZME development can continue in full force.

Over the last month, I've been sprinting on ZME again, writing tons of Modules. In the last month, the code size has grown over 2x. We're sitting pretty at 8.2K lines, but I suspect the point before we're able to replace ZR it's going to be about 10K. Thanks to @Seeker and @dillinger for doing some preliminary testing with me, we found a few bad bugs early on two week ago. There are still some lingering bugs, and unimplemented features, as a few of you discovered when we live tested it on ZM tonight.

So we've had our ban list for many, many years now. We used to lose it all the time due to unfixed Source Engine exploits (which still exist today... lol). Keeping this ban list has been a pretty scary relic of our past, was our protection against hackers, exploiters, and many other nasties. However, again, this is a relic of the past. Do we still need this? Probably not. We've been contemplating it for a while, and today is the day that we've dumped our ban list. Rather, all bans that were a year or older, and on the day before the 1 year anniversary of @DopeScope's permanent ban! However, you should probably be reminded that he evaded, so DopeScope would still be banned today. A total of 7,445 bans were lifted, which were all over a year old. This does not mean everyone was unbanned.

Another change includes Goomba Stomping enemy players, which is on the Zombie servers. Should you as a Zombie jump on someone's head, they will be infected. However, if you're a Human jumping on a Zombie, you will deal a ton of damage to them. Jump enough times to kill them, and play a sound from our wonderful UT3 announcer (sm_announer / !announcer).

The other change is a slight tweak to the Spray Tracer. Using sm_sprayj, you can jump to a players spray should you be in spectate. Using sm_sprayt you can view if the client has an active spray, its location relative to you (if you're into hide and seek or whatever), and the usual data.

The newest change is the re-addition of our AntiBhop plugin. m_flMaxspeed broke sometime...

We've upgraded our CPU to Ivy Bridge from Sandy Bridge. Same version, but some benchmarks online showed it to be a lot more powerful (The price difference was relatively close, we've been considering it for a month, and jumped last night). We've also done a software update, which included a ton of updated packages varying from the network to glibc. We've also updated our kernel, which has a new Intel CPU scheduler, hopefully it helps.

Valve pushed a fairly significant update today that makes changes to both the server and client distribution system. I've been prepping on the weekends for this, and for the most part ZM and ZE work. We had to resync with the main ZR branch, so things will be busted like cookies saving and other misc things. I intend on fixing this when I get home. I rolled out two emergency patches already, but I'm on my phone now and I don't think there's a git client for Android

ZMP and MG haven't been updated, I'll be doing this later in the day as well. Thanks for your patience.

If there are any new bugs please post them in here and tag me. We will probably be sprinting, but its better then allowing it to linger.

Due to the current clowns spoofing our address and querying the hell out of other servers (so we get the traffic back), we've had to make our firewall a bit more robust. Since a restart was required (required a few obscure kernel modules), I took advantage of the downtime to update some binaries on the servers. This includes a new MySQL client, ClientPrefs overhaul, SQlite update, and a few memory related fixes. We will probably have more downtime this week as CS:S moves to VPKs, but that's for another thread.

Let @Haplo know if there are any problems in relation to this, or post in the thread.

Done, updated our kernel to 3.6.11 and synced a bunch of new libraries up (one server won't blow up when we reboot it now ). Thanks for your patience! The guesstimated downtime was 5 minutes per server.

You can access the server via any of the following hostnames: mg.plaguefest.com, cm.plaguefest.com, customs.plaguefest.com

The map rotation is a work in progress at the moment (as is the server itself - rank/stats might get reset, and we hope to add deathmatch mode to certain maps (and perhaps have it as something that can be toggled on/off via vote similar to rtv)). We've only added a handful of custom maps to get things started, and MG maps have yet to be pruned. We need some input from the community to help us decide which mg maps we want to save and keep on rotation.

Yeah, alright, we've fallen into the gimmick of Tracers (again). This time around, it's not just on snipers, it's on every gun; only when you fire ("modern" tracers).

You're a liar! I don't see any of these so called Tracers!Good. If you haven't selected a tracer colour using sm_tracer, you won't see any tracers from anyone.

I selected a tracer; but now everyone has one!Good. If you have a colour set, everyone else is assigned a random colour if they're not opted in (or their selected colour, if they are with the good).

I'm a Zombie and not everyone has a tracer anymore!Good. If you haven't explicitly enabled your tracer, it won't be visible to zombies.

This is available to everyone, if you're a donor or not. The overhead shouldn't be that bad either, but if we start getting strange TE crashes, we're going to have to rethink this. Thanks to @Aprz for being the first consumer (verifying I didn't mess up the shared networking). As an aside, everyone looks like Predator with this enabled. I'm trying to come up with a portable way around this, but for the moment, pretend it's an Alien film.

Thanks to @Detonator for his thread and contributing ideas/code, we now have a party system (I believe in other FPS games they might be closer to Squads). A party is a group of people intending on working together. What a party allows for is for you to "Fly" (teleport) to your fellow group members before zombie's have a chance of turning on the map (using sm_pfly). There's also a party chat (sm_pchat, or Team Chat Key, $ Message) that you may use as well. As a reminder, all chats/actions are logged, so try to remain civil should you use this feature.

There's no protection against people joining random groups. All of your team members should have a common interest, staying alive. If you leak your party name to another user that you don't want in there, they're welcome to join your party and there's nothing you can do about it. Should this happen, you can create a new party (or join a new one) using the sm_party command. You may list current members in your party using the sm_plist command, if you're super paranoid.

You may automatically teleport to a per-round randomized leader for your group using the toggle sm_ptele. You may also leave a party at anytime using sm_pleave (or sm_party "").

We've been silently rolling out changes for a while. I think the oldest would be a refactor of NT, and the newest would be the Anti-Edging plugin I wrote last night and tested earlier this morning. There's a pretty significant change to AFKMan which will result in idle spectators (regardless of class) being kicked. There are also some older bugs with DamageDisplay, Announcer, and other plugins that were fixed (printing unsigned numbers as signed). Reserved slots should also have better functionality. ZR was updated to the main branch (when the VPK change happened), which resulted in some pretty serious regressions (crashing). While I believe it was fixed last night, please be vigilant and let us know if it continues. There's some freezing, but there are other reports out there that it's a regression from the VPK update. Obviously ZR isn't on MG, and some MG plugins aren't on the zombie servers, so this thread is basically a combination. I'd also like to request some information from you guys, is anything still busted that you use daily? If so, again, please let us know.

About a year ago when AceHigh was testing his Minigame's map (Moovie, or whatever typo it had), someone was kind enough to use a SourceMod exploit to flood the server, disrupting chat. I wrote an emergency plugin to work around the problem, since the exploit is in CPP and in a few base plugins. I made a few patches, but if they're not accepted into the main tree, it's pretty painful to deal with everytime we need to update SM (which is often). So that hack, workaround plugin became a permanent addition to the servers. This created a pretty serious problem, since it would catch legitimate players, resulting in many, many bans. The LSAs have been kind enough to review each case, and ban/unban...

We've updated our SM/MM:S to the official builds once again. The official builds include SDKHooks now, so that was an improvement. I do hope there's no fallout, but everything should mostly be back to normal (well, normal functionality should be, a few plugins are still busted). Thanks for your patience.

Hi guys, we still haven't fixed things properly. So my plan is to wake up early in the morning and roll updates out. The goal is for 5AM PST, but who actually knows. This could also end horrifically bad, and result in longer then expected (5 minutes) downtime.

Update: We're running SM1.5 on all of our servers now (No more mixture, I thought it wasn't, but it was). As well to this, I've been messing with SDKHooks quite a bit, the performance changes could be pretty damaging, not make a difference at all, or be a total win. It's really up to you guys to let me know, I don't think it would hurt anything, though.

It's that time again, we've synced with the official repositories and moved our kernel version up to the 3.6 series. The emulation layer (along with a bunch of other libs) were updated, so hopefully there's a performance win there. While we're expecting a CS:S update this week, it's possible it will be delayed again (probably forever ), so there may be more downtime ahead.

Updated the Kernel to 3.5.7 and glibc. Bash and some other programs were updated to fix vulnerabilities. udev was also added to the system. Also fixed the network configuration for BaseLayout2 (OpenRC), hopefully there's no fallout.

There's about 6~ months of rolling packages updates, so hopefully there's some improvement.

Huge thanks to @Dharkk for doing some tedious work defining each map in GameModes_Server.txt and @CyphX for play testing.

Same-ish bugs as ZM. If you notice you're dying too quickly, check your class, you may be a human
^ While I'm adamant it's a CS:GO bug (Never saw it before Update 17) with GetTeamNumber (Getting the same crashes that CS:S does... lol), it's probably something I've done, or a bug I've yet to find in ZR.

Monumental thanks to the content porters/creators who've been churning out maps. Thanks again to Dharkk for compiling the map list, and making my life a lot easier.